Women's Work.

I think of them, all huddled in dirt-made houses, caves, and kingdoms.  Ancient ruins today but alive and bustling in B.C.  I think of them listening, hurting, hugging, nursing, and loving their little ones.  Trading shifts and jobs and arms and tasks as new little bundles come and grow throughout the years.  Generations of women doing generations of women's work.  Loving each other.  Being community.  Being there.  Being real.  Being alive and active and serving in eachother's lives.

I think of me, sitting alone at my computer, parking lot outside empty of cars and people, all void to home to keep up with the hustle.  Independent. Just me and google.  A phone.  A computer.  A car.  A network of women, all scattered away.

I think of them holding, wet nursing the newest little pudge of wrinkle, mama's cooing and on-looking, waiting to see and hold or snuggle.  I think of them, some resting in Red Tents, the struggle of womanhood amongst women.  I envision great-grandma watching toddlers chase quail while bigger kids hear the distant matriarch voices lingering beyond.

I think of my woman, most moved away from family, longing for mentors and friends and women.  Searching for women who help them, care for them, nurture them, mature them.  Pining for peers to be colleagues in motherhood and womanhood.  Scrambling to search engines and books for insight on babies.  Needing women.

We used to do this together.  We used to be women, with women, doing women's work.  We used to be in community, exchanging aged wisdom and raising our homes and babies together.

Titus 2 is speaks of older women teaching women about womanhood, about the home, about mothering.  I can't help but wonder how different those B.C. and early A.D. cultures are from our postmodern days.

Is there a holy longing back for this, or is it just me?  For mothers, mothering in the context of community, in the surrounding of generations.  For women together, doing women's work.

Words associated with young mothering -- lonely, anxious, exhausting -- would look so different in the context of years gone by.  Possibly even eliminated.  Could they even be replaced with the images of gathered women?  Women sharing the joy and burden of motherhood with the context of generations and divided tasks and physical presence?

Oh, surely, there is much to be woad.  I know that.  The romantic vision of it in my head probably needs the proper balance of the B.C. mothers wanting to shut out advice, shun a relative, or find silence during naptime instead of participate in the hub-bub around, but still...

I think something changes for women, for mothers, when this context has community.  When their life has a circle, a knitting of those committed and communing.

Perhaps it can be done.  Perhaps it just takes a few women, committing to a few women, and growing their women together.  Perhaps it's just putting feet to Titus 2.  Perhaps it's just holding babies and making meals and showing hospitality and stepping in, and being willing to be stepped in to.  Being women, with women.

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I can't help but feel a deep, engrained longing for this beautiful community.  It draws such attention to what I had and what I left, back home with family.  Like the Barlow Lake Day my Smith Aunts grabbed Camilla from her carseat and held her all day, loving me in such a way...  Now that is holy longing.  And a blessed giving.

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And a little PS -- this blog is NOT about gender roles or women in the work place or men staying home.  Its about hearts and life and community, and me, right now.